When we talk about scale at HARAKA, ACTIVE Communities is the project we mean. Delivered in partnership with Ma’an, The Authority of Social Contribution, the initiative took on a simple but ambitious brief: turn everyday public spaces across Abu Dhabi into places where people actually move. Between September 2023 and August 2024, that meant transforming 49 parks and 6 malls, 55 sites in total, into working wellness hubs, open to anyone who wanted to take part…
The programme had previously run under the name ACTIVE Parks, and the rebrand to ACTIVE Communities reflected something real about how it had grown. This was no longer just about parks. Malls became venues too, bringing wellness activity into spaces people already visit for entirely different reasons, and turning a quick shopping trip into a chance to join a session. That shift, from parkland to the full spread of everyday public life, is part of what made the second phase of the programme feel different from the first.
Over the course of the year, HARAKA delivered 672 sessions across these sites. That’s not a headline number we picked for effect, it’s the actual scheduling reality of running consistent activity across 55 locations for twelve months, through summer heat, cooler months, weekdays and weekends. Every one of those sessions needed a venue booked, equipment in place, and someone qualified running it on the ground.
That someone was very often one of the 638 wellness ambassadors trained by HARAKA specifically for this programme. Training hundreds of ambassadors isn’t a side note, it’s the backbone of how a project like this actually works. You can’t put on 672 sessions across a city with a small central team travelling from site to site. You need people embedded locally, trained to a consistent standard, who understand both the activity they’re delivering and the community they’re delivering it to. Alongside the ambassadors, 38 participating companies came on board over the year, adding their own energy and resources to specific sessions and sites.
The result of all that groundwork was participation on a scale that’s genuinely hard to plan for in advance. Over the life of the programme, 34,631 individuals took part. That’s not a projected or rounded figure, it’s the actual count of people who turned up to a park or a mall and joined in, across every age group and every corner of the emirate the programme reached. For a city-wide public wellness initiative, that kind of sustained turnout over a full year is the real measure of success, more than any single flagship event could be.
What ACTIVE Communities demonstrates, more than any other project in our portfolio, is that HARAKA can design and run large-scale wellness programmes that hold together over the long term rather than for a single afternoon. Parks and malls are not controlled environments like a gym or a corporate office. They’re open, unpredictable, and used by completely different people every single day. Building a programme that works reliably in that setting, week after week, for a full year, takes a different kind of operational discipline than a one-off activation. It’s logistics, training and consistency stacked on top of each other, site after site, until it becomes something the community can actually rely on and plan their week around.
Most companies don’t get handed a brief like ACTIVE Communities. Running it well takes more than good intentions, it takes an organisation built around the idea that movement should be part of ordinary life, not an occasional extra. That’s really the whole point of HARAKA. We’re an Abu Dhabi based wellness company, and our mission has always been to help this region become a genuinely more active and healthier place to live, not by asking people to change their entire routine, but by putting movement somewhere they already are: their local park, their workplace, their school, their neighbourhood mall.
ACTIVE Communities is our flagship programme because it’s the clearest expression of that mission at full scale. It sits alongside the six services we run day to day, Gym & Physical Wellness, Employee Wellbeing, Team Building, Events Management, School Outreach and Active Youth Holiday Camps, and it draws on all of that experience at once. Running sessions across 55 sites for a year needs the coaching depth of our gym team, the programme design skills we use for corporate wellbeing work, and the event delivery muscle we’ve built running community activations Abu Dhabi has come to know us for. It’s really the whole company working as one.
A project of this size doesn’t happen without a serious, long-term partner, and Ma’an has been exactly that. We’ve also built strong working relationships over the years with organisations like Aldar, Miral, the Department of Community Development and the Family Care Authority, each of whom shares an interest in getting more people moving in public and community settings across the UAE. Partnerships like these are what let a wellbeing company Abu Dhabi based like us think in terms of years and cities, not single events.
Sustaining something like ACTIVE Communities is less about any one clever idea and more about doing the unglamorous parts properly: training ambassadors to a real standard, showing up on schedule at every site, and treating consistency as the actual product. We’ve been doing this work for a good number of years now, long enough to know that a programme only earns its place in a community once people start expecting it to be there. That’s the standard we hold ourselves to on every wellness project we take on, big or small.
If you’re part of a government entity, developer or organisation thinking about what community wellness could look like across your own sites, we’d genuinely like to hear from you. Get in touch with our team and let’s talk about what we could build together.
Written by Rensché Graham Corporate Wellness Manager, HARAKA, October 2026
Reviewed by Sam Bolger, Managing Partner, HARAKA, October 2026